Rabbi Stephen Baars on Love

well it's great to have you on and you speak all over the place and you and you write and you talk about these concepts but let's sort of delve into this concept of definition of love why do we need to define love i mean isn't it just like a feeling that either i feel or i don't feel that's that's a that's a fantastic you know when i first came to a chat met rav noah he talked about that that was like like that's like the light bulb go off you know because you go up in the western world and everything's a feeling and you can't define love that was a there's a big theme and he made it very clear that love is love is very clear and there's a definition and he pointed out love is the emotion we have when we focus on somebody's virtues it was he was great everything had to be defined by him he was a very articulate intellectual kind of person and when you have a definition of something you have control over it you can manage it it's the same as any other computer you know for a lot of people it's just a black box which just like does things but if you know how it works you can master it the same thing with emotions so so let's delve into that so the the famous noah principle of noah for those who are um are unfamiliar of noah weinberg is the founder of asia torah and he has a famous series on so many things one of them was love and so rabbi noah would define love as the emotion you feel when you focus on the virtues of others that's right so let's let's like walk through that how does that apply i mean take take me through the scenario in which someone says i want to increase love how does of knowledge say to go about do it how does of knowledge say to what what to avoid how does it work well he used to have a thing called the love gang and it's very powerful especially cubs i i i do my in my marriage seminar and um you sit opposite each other and you make a list to say five virtues i i adapted a little bit from love now but i'll give you my version but it's included in his version and what you do is you sit opposite each other and you go through the virtues in tandem right so you know your wife would say i love you charlie because you're the best looking guy out there i appreciate that thank you rabbi you're welcome anytime yeah i'm trying to give your wife some lines i appreciate that i'll feed that to her i'll make sure she's watching and then you and then you pull back you know you say and and when you focus on people's virtues and you identify them you experience love and we all have that you know when uh whenever there's people we like we can identify why it is we like them and in the opposite is also true if you focus on people's uh problems issues you're going to hate them you know what's fascinating about what you're saying and it's i love it and i'll tell you why because this is why we're doing the show right like in that when you live in a life and you're and you think that love is just this this emotion you can't put your hands on that's right then some days you feel it some days you don't like you know like you find like i'm like you hear words like i've fallen in love you know saying you're like what does that even mean like with whom and how and it like you're trying to capture capture things right but what you're saying is no no no no no stop really you can actually capture it and actually bring it a lot more in your life if you just know how to like manipulate the system in the good old days you had lps remember that was that before your time it may be long playing records and you'd have oh yeah it's before my time sorry all right so you'd have a the guy was singing the first song was that i love you so much i love you so much and the awesome was i can't stand you anymore right right right by the time you got to end the record he was done exactly he loved somebody else so much so what's fun is it so i really want people to put this into practice i i'd love to give everybody myself included sort of like real work like let's walk away from the show and be like wait i really want to like play with this a little bit so what i'm hearing you say is that this is this is this is like this isn't you know sort of like a metaphor or this isn't some fleeting emotion this is real stuff this is intellectual stuff which is if i define it which is why we do this then i can now try to test it so i would love to suggest and tell you there's a good idea for this shabbat for somebody whether they do it in person it doesn't even a spouse right it could be a friend it could be it could be before shabbat whatever it is if what you're saying is like this if you pick somebody in your life and if you're watching the show just do it now pick someone in your life and identify let's say three because five can take a little bit long we want to make sure we're still paying attention to the show right with the next guest so so take three three traits that they represent that you love about them right and what they should be experiencing is some heightened maybe feeling or awareness that ravnoch would say that is the path or that is love exactly now if you want to go a little deeper on that let's do it okay hang on everybody so pick virtues that you don't have ah oh that's even better right good rabbi okay now what you'll find is fascinating is the virtues that you don't have are the reasons that person drives you crazy you see let's say for instance you you love your spouse for instance which is a good person to love right and you love them because they're very organized and i'm not very organized and i love it they're so organized but that reason i'm not organized is because i'm not willing to put the time in and put things where they need to go i'm not wanting to do that and therefore my wife drives me nuts because she's telling me to put things where they should go and she's upset when i don't put things where they go so the thing that i love about her is the very thing that is also annoying about her very good very good and when you identify that thing as love right now in your brain you've attached a positive connection to that which would on a normal day bring negative emotions that's exactly right right awesome and when you do it in a class people start to realize awesome it's a package deal if i want someone who's organized i'm going to have to clean up right now you're going to have to get the other one right you can't have one without the other and even even and let's take it one step further because i know we have i would stay here the whole time until this thing gets done but we have the rest of the show to go to even even so that in fact the fact that you have someone that is not like you actually again it does not be spouse it could be friends it could be family it could be colleagues expand it out in your life the fact that they're in your life actually rounds you out that's right that's right the missing part thanks so much for watching for more content like 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